Niv M. Sultan – OpenSecrets Newshttps://www.opensecrets.org/news
Breaking news, original reporting, and investigative journalism *on money in politics from the Center for Responsive PoliticsMon, 19 Nov 2018 22:25:20 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8Trucking, railroad industries wrestle with each other as technology bears down on bothhttps://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/trucking-railroad-industries-wrestle/
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/trucking-railroad-industries-wrestle/#respondWed, 17 May 2017 19:09:11 +0000https://www.opensecrets.org/news/?p=22649Uber service for pallets of lumber, crates of fruit and boxes of bolts? Last week, the company’s embattled CEO Travis…

A double-trailer truck of the sort that much of the trucking industry would like to be able to use nationwide. The railroads aren’t big fans. (Photo: Joseph Madden via Wikimedia Commons)

Uber service for pallets of lumber, crates of fruit and boxes of bolts? Last week, the company’s embattled CEO Travis Kalanick tweeted an image of an “Uber Freight” truck, a product of the company’s still-gestating foray into the trucking industry. Amazon, reportedly, is also working on an app that will connect truckers and shippers — and other companies are in the on-demand freight fray, too, all wanting a piece of the trucking pie. No wonder: In 2015, the industry amassed a record $726 billion in gross revenues, moving 10.5 billion tons of freight.

Disruptors are everywhere in the current economy, but the trucking industry also continues to contend with one of its timeless enemies: Railroads. The two have long vied for shares of the freight economy and fought pitched policy battles in Washington to create favorable conditions for their interests.

Railroads, too, are staring down the barrel of changing technology. With automated railway systems proliferating around the world, the future increasingly seems to be one without drivers and conductors.

Some on Capitol Hill are eager to prevent, or at least stall, that possibility. In January, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) introduced the Safe Freight Act, a bill intended to mandate that a crew of at least two people — one locomotive engineer and one conductor — operates trains at all times. The bill has received the support of unions like the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers; transportation unions have given Young nearly $860,000 in contributions over the course of his career, his third-greatest source of donations. The Federal Railroad Administration has also recommended two-person crew requirements, but various railroad operators, including Union Pacific, and the industry’s main trade group, the Association of American Railroads (AAR), have opposed such a plan.

Proponents of two-person crew requirements claim the policy would enhance safety; detractors counter that there is no proof of that (though nobody has much experience running freight trains without engineers and conductors). And in September 2016, AAR pointed out what the rail group views as an inconsistency between government policies, saying that “While the [US] Department of Transportation is throwing its full support behind development of autonomous vehicles as a way to improve safety on our roadways, it is backing a rule-making for the rail industry that goes in the opposite direction and would freeze rail productivity.”

Meanwhile, other issues that run through the nation’s capital preoccupy the industries: For instance, consolidation in the trucking market brought Knight Transportation and Swift Transportation together in April in a merger valued at $6 billion, but the deal must be approved by federal antitrust regulators.

Then there’s President Donald Trump‘s possible openness to raising the gas tax, which he voiced earlier this month in an interview with Bloomberg. Since then, he’s been radio silent on the topic (and hasn’t delivered a promised plan for overhauling the nation’s infrastructure) — although plenty of others have weighed in on whether the levy on each gallon of gas should be hiked.

The tax functions as the main source of revenue for the Highway Trust Fund, which pays for transportation projects such as road development but hasn’t been raised since 1993. As a result, domestic infrastructure continues to degrade and the trust fund continuallyflirts with insolvency — not ideal for an industry reliant on good roads.

The American Trucking Associations, the industry’s largest trade group, has lobbied on fuel taxes every year since 2008. But while the industry thoroughly tilts Republican (at least 60 percent of the contributions it has given to candidates and parties have gone to the GOP since the 1992 cycle), groups that are similarly conservative, like Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, are against it — a classic divide between ideology and concrete self interest.

Overall, trucking put more than $9.1 million into lobbying in 2016. Railroads, on the other hand, rang up a bill of more than $26 million, although that industry’s lobbying outlays have consistently decreased each year since 2012, when it spent over $46 million.

Among the trucking industry’s myriad lobbying concerns are fuel efficiency, homeland security, regulations on how long truckers can drive without a break and the transportation of hazardous materials. Railroads are invested in some of the same issues, as well as some more specific to their own industry, such as tamping down congressional concern over fiery accidents involving trains pulling tankers of crude.

Another perpetual issue: The drive (sorry) by the trucking industry to put longer freight trailers on the highway. Currently, the trailers on freight trucks can be as long as 53 feet, but the industry wants to switch over to twin 33-foot trailers, for a total of 66 feet of storage. The change, the industry claims, would boost both efficiency and safety, since fewer trucks would be on the road. Attempts to include language in the Transportation Department’s budget along those lines have come up short, but trucking interests keep trying.

The rail industry is, surely, all for safety, but it claims that twin 33-foot trailers would in fact be less safe. It also would prefer that trucking didn’t become too efficient. AAR has lobbied on truck size and/or weight issues every year since 2010, and both rail and trucking have paid to have law enforcement officers lobby Congress on the issue, sometimes leaving those officers in the dark about who’s covering the costs of their trips to D.C. And in one case, the vice chairman of the National Troopers Coalition spoke of the dangers of longer trucks — without disclosing that he was on the payroll of a railroad industry-funded group. In 2015, a trucking industry group cited a report confirming the increased safety of twin 33-foot trailers, but did not mention that members of the industry had funded said report.

Both industries supplement their lobbying with a well-oiled system of campaign contributions. Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) has made out especially well, having received a combined $837,000 from the trucking and railroad industries since 2007. He happens to be chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Top recipients of campaign contributions from trucking and railroad industries, 2007-2016

Only one Democrat cracked the top five recipients of railroad money; none made it into the ranks of trucking’s favorites.

If a lawmaker is especially lucky, more than just campaign contributions might come their way. Last Wednesday, as per Politico reporting, AAR and GoRail, a freight rail advocacy group, held their first Railroad Achievement Awards, during which they recognized Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) for their friendship to the industry. But while awards and ceremonies are nice, cash can be nicer. Thune has received nearly $555,000 from the railroad industry over the course of his career, and Nelson almost $344,000.

]]>https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/trucking-railroad-industries-wrestle/feed/0Beyond the NEA budget: The political side of arthttps://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/beyond-the-nea-budget-the-political-side-of-art/
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/beyond-the-nea-budget-the-political-side-of-art/#respondMon, 08 May 2017 13:08:54 +0000https://www.opensecrets.org/news/?p=21949The Recording Academy’s high-wattage GRAMMYs on the Hill event in early April honored Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Susan Collins…

The late Roy Lichtenstein, whose work “The Ring (Engagement)” is pictured, was a Democratic donor, though not as prolific as his widow. Dorothy Lichtenstein gave $1.2 million to Democratic and liberal candidates and committees in the 2016 election cycle. (Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire)

The Recording Academy’s high-wattage GRAMMYs on the Hill event in early April honored Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) for their commitment to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) — an agency that President Donald Trump‘s administration has proposed cutting.

Still, stars like country singers Keith Urban and Wynonna Judd, both of whom performed that night, don’t rely on the NEA for their survival; they were there, in part, to underscore the central role of the endowment in the artistic endeavors of nonprofits, museums, schools, local governments and other noncommercial organizations. Among last fall’s grantees: The city of Los Angeles, which received $50,000 for an exhibition about Latin American art and architecture; Step Afrika! of Washington, D.C., awarded $10,000 to support its Black History Month tour; and the Cuyahoga Community College Foundation in Cleveland, which won two grants, including $20,000 for an educational jazz festival.

Without much of a presence on the Hill, such community-centric organizations rely largely on advocates in the broader arts universe, like the Recording Academy, which spent $162,000 lobbying last year, and Americans for the Arts, a group that spent $160,000 lobbying on issues like arts education and creative arts therapy access for veterans.

In the first quarter of 2017, Americans for the Arts ramped up, spending $90,000 on lobbying — more than half its outlays for all of 2016. Funding for NEA and its companion group, the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the first concern it listed on its lobbying report.

Another concern listed by the group: tax deductions for charitable contributions, which, as of last month, some in the Trump administration reportedly were considering capping as part of a tax reform proposal.

That could be a matter of life and death for arts groups, which rely heavily on donations. In 2012, for example, the NEA reported that nonprofit performing arts groups and museums received nearly 45 percent of their revenue from government and private sector contributions. Almost all of that, however, came from individuals, foundations and corporations; less than 7 percent of total revenue came from the government at any level.

Then why is the NEA so significant for these groups?

For one, the endowment helps make up for the geographically disproportionate nature of charitable giving, said Elizabeth Auclair, an NEA spokesperson, in an email. Rural areas receive only 5.5 percent of philanthropic dollars, she explained.

The second reason: Government grants can catalyze private giving by legitimizing a project. “Research shows that even a low level of public funding can stimulate private giving,” wrote Auclair. NEA’s funding must be matched by money from other sources, and “when a nonprofit receives an NEA award, it provides the credibility for other funders to step up.”

In fiscal year 2016, NEA grants resulted in $500 million in matching support, Auclair noted.

Art is for everyone, but its money leans left

When it comes to campaign contributions, the kinds of arts organizations that might receive a small NEA grant are unlikely to be rife with high-earning employees capable of donating large sums of money to politicians. Still, some of the bigger groups and arts institutions do make a mark. Americans for the Arts has a PAC (a rarity in the art world), and between that and gifts from its leadership and staff, the organization gave nearly $143,000 in contributions last cycle, 84 percent of which went to Democrats. The group’s top recipient after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ($10,711) was Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus. She received $10,000, and her co-chair, Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.), received $3,500.

Overall, Democrats get the lion’s share of contributions from arts organizations, perhaps because they seem more willing to publicly associate themselves with the cause. Although the Recording Academy honored one senator from each party (Maine Republican Collins and New Mexico Democrat Udall) with its political Grammys, about 79 percent of the 160 members of the Congressional Arts Caucus are Democrats.

In the 2016 cycle, individuals associated with the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Association of Museums all gave 99 percent or more of their contributions to Democrats. In fact, Natural History has given all of its contributions of more than $200 to Democrats since at least 1994. The level of the gifts varies widely between groups: The museum association gave $1,600, Natural History gave more than $27,800, and the Met gave a relatively whopping $282,000 ($20,000 from Joanne Lyman, who used to manage jewelry reproduction for the museum; about $50,000 from Laurel Britton, head of strategy; and nearly $161,000 from Annette de la Renta, a board member.)

Private art galleries skew no less Democratic.

Over the course of the past four election cycles, seven galleries (selected for their prominence and because they employ active political donors) gave less than $1 million combined. Two of them, Gagosian Gallery and Pace Gallery, accounted for more than half that total. (We didn’t include Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as their business dealings extend beyond those of a traditional gallery.)

Most of the money from Gagosian and Pace came from their respective owners. In the 2016 cycle, Larry Gagosian gave about $86,400 (almost all of Gagosian Gallery’s contributions) to candidates, party committees and other groups, and Arnold and Mildred Glimcher of Pace Gallery gave more than $186,000. Gagosian made six gifts, and only one went to a Republican; all 159 of the Glimcher couple’s gifts went to Democratic candidates and groups.

In addition to gallery owners and employees, some of the artists on display are donors as well. Multimedia artists Carol Brown Goldberg and Pamela Joseph have contributed more than $1 million and nearly $233,000, respectively, since 2008 — all to Democratic and liberal candidates and groups. And remember the iconic “Hope” poster from President Barack Obama‘s 2008 campaign? Shepard Fairey, its designer, gave $17,700 to the DNC that cycle. (He also sent $2,300 Obama’s way.)

Before his death in 1997, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was a reliable Democratic donor. His contributions pale next to those of his widow, though: Dorothy Lichtenstein, president of the foundation that bears his name, made more than $1.2 million in contributions in the 2016 cycle. Planned Parenthood Votes, a super PAC, received $900,000 of that, another $100,200 benefited the DNC Services Corp. and other gifts went to various Democratic party committees, candidates and PACs.

Regardless of the arts universe’s progressive leanings, lawmakers of both parties might find reason to get behind the NEA; its data shows it awards 40 percent of its grantmaking budget directly to states, and, in fiscal year 2016, it recommended grants in every congressional district in the country. At a cost equal to approximately 0.004 percent of the federal budget, that kind of local aid could be difficult even for Congress’ most hardened small-government advocates to make a stink about.

On April 7, 11 House Republicans — along with many of their Democratic peers — signed a letter not only standing by the NEA, but also seeking a roughly 5 percent increase in its funding. The letter went to Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the chairman and ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, which handles the NEA and NEH’s budgets.

And now, those lawmakers, along with the arts community, seem to be getting what they want — for the time being, at least. Last week, Congress agreed on a budget that calls for a $2 million increase in the NEA’s funding, which would raise the agency’s budget to what it had requested for fiscal year 2017 more than a year ago.

]]>https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/beyond-the-nea-budget-the-political-side-of-art/feed/0Where are they now? Lucrative lobbying gigs, other jobs landed by newly-former lawmakershttps://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/now-lucrative-lobbying-gigs-jobs-landed-newly-former-lawmakers/
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/now-lucrative-lobbying-gigs-jobs-landed-newly-former-lawmakers/#respondMon, 01 May 2017 14:00:07 +0000https://www.opensecrets.org/news/?p=22225“I think that American people should know that the members of Congress are underpaid,” said Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) in…

Former Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), pictured here in 2014, is a defender of ex-lawmakers who become lobbyists. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

“I think that American people should know that the members of Congress are underpaid,” said Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) in April 2014, having recently announced his retirement from the House.

To be fair, he was discussing the results of an annual House vote on adjusting lawmaker pay: Each year, Congress can give itself a raise to keep up with rising costs of living, but — with lawmakers wary of casting a vote that could so obviously be used against them in a campaign — it has voted against doing so since increasing the salary of rank-and-file lawmakers from $169,300 to $174,000 in 2009.

Luckily for Moran and others exiting Capitol Hill, there’s money to be made with government credentials. In early 2014, the Sunlight Foundation estimated that while lobbyists made a median of nearly $180,000 in lobbying revenue in 2012, the median for lobbyists with government experience was $300,000. No doubt aware of his earning potential, Moran went on to lobby for McDermott, Will, and Emery. Among his clients in 2016 was Boeing Co., which contributed $156,000 to his campaign committee over the course of his career, making the company his third-biggest donor.

Also keen on representing Boeing is former Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who lost his re-election bid to Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) in 2016. Kirk has said that he’s considering opening up a lobbying shop and that he’s “already talked to Boeing.” And why not, when Boeing spent more than $17 million lobbying in 2016, with its average lobbying contract worth nearly $172,000?

With their treasure troves of connections and policymaking know-how, former lawmakers are hot commodities for lobbying firms. And while ex-representatives must wait one year, and ex-senators two years, before lobbying their former colleagues, that doesn’t stop them from laying the groundwork for lobbying careers.

As long as individuals don’t exceed certain thresholds based on compensation and time spent on clients, they can carry out lobbying-esque work during their cooling-off period; “strategic adviser” is a typical title for these ex-lawmakers in the early days of their new careers. That, according to Brendan Fischer, director of the Campaign Legal Center’s federal and FEC reform program, makes the mandated waiting periods “fairly easy” to get around. In addition, there’s no restriction on former senators or House members lobbying the executive branch.

Then there’s former Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), who resigned in 2015 and is now a senior strategic advisor at lobbying powerhouse Squire Patton Boggs. He’s also on the board of Reynolds American, the nation’s second-largest tobacco company and producer of brands like Camel, Newport, Pall Mall, and Kent. Boehner was big tobacco’s prime recipient of campaign contributions in the 2014 cycle, the last one in which he ran for re-election; he received more than $130,000 from the industry then.

Critics of this path for former lawmakers worry that the prospect of future employment can skew how they behave while they’re still on the public payroll.

“The prospect of a lucrative post-government career can create warped incentives while a member is still in office,” Fischer wrote in an email. “[A] current member’s position on an issue may not be motivated by what’s best for their constituents or the country, but based on what’s going to curry favor with a future employer. More broadly, the revolving door helps contribute to a permanent political class that creates distance between the people who run the government and the people they are supposed to serve.”

Moran, though, explains that he was true to his values in Congress, and continues to be so in his advising role. “One of the reasons that I chose McDermott, Will and Emery has borne out, and that is that they weren’t going to ask me to work on anything that I didn’t believe in,” he said. “Those who have different points of view would probably represent a different corporation or interest, but if I talk to a member, I’m not going to ask them to do something that I don’t believe is in their interest or the interest of their constituents. And that’s why they would spend time with me, and engage in extended conversation: Because they, I hope, would trust that that would always be the case.”

As for what drew him to his new career after 24 years in Congress: “I figured that if I go with a firm I can concentrate on fewer issues, I can spend more time with my children, and I could even afford to own a home,” he said.

Lobbying might be an especially lucrative career path, but it isn’t the only line of work that awaits former lawmakers. Former Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and former Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) both now work in the federal government — Coats is the director of National Intelligence, and Fleming’s the deputy assistant secretary for health technology at HHS. Former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), on the other hand, founded PAC for a Change and is raising money to target competitive Senate races.

Outgoing lawmakers intent on staying in the public sector, like former Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.), can also transition to state or local government; she’s now the public works commissioner of Macomb County, Michigan.

But for those eager to leave the government and its dealings behind, the private sector is rich with opportunity. Former Rep. Brad Ashford (D-Neb.), for example, was scooped up by Midtown Vision 2050, a development company looking to build up a portion of Omaha, Nebraska — the largest city in Ashford’s one-time district.

Alternatively, four outgoing lawmakers are headed back to school, having accepted university gigs: Former Reps. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) and Robert Hurt (R-Va.), as well as former Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.). But academia and lobbying have plenty of overlap: While Mikulski and Israel are settling into academically-oriented posts — Israel at Long Island University as chairman of the LIU Global Institute and distinguished writer in residence, and Mikulski as professor of public policy and adviser to the university’s president at Johns Hopkins University — Salmon has taken the role of vice president for government affairs at Arizona State University and Hurt will lead Liberty University’s Center for Law and Government, which aims “to influence public policy in America and to celebrate and spread conservative ideals.”

To see the full list of the 114th Congress’ outgoing members, follow this link. We update the page as we learn how the former lawmakers choose to lead their post-congressional careers.

House and Senate staffers who recently gave up — by necessity or voluntarily — their congressional work-spaces are another story, and one we’ll tell soon.

Trump received about $6 billion in free media during the campaign, meaning he and the groups supporting him could spend less producing ads and buying expensive TV time. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)

Election Day, 2016? Now an ancient memory from a distant time. But the intervening months have allowed us to do some math and determine, finally, the price tag for the whole shebang. We can now report that the total cost of the election was nearly $6.5 billion, a 3 percent increase from 2012’s figure of just under $6.3 billion.

Adjusted for inflation, however, that’s actually a drop of about 1.4 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending also fell from 2010 to 2014, making this a two-cycle trend.

The presidential race was responsible, in large part, for keeping the tally down in 2016. Despite the crowded field of 19 candidates, the cost of the White House race — at under $2.4 billion, including campaign committee and outside spending — was lower than that of both 2008 (about $2.8 billion) and 2012 (over $2.6 billion), even when measured by actual dollars (not inflation-adjusted).

Congressional races, on the other hand, were pricier than ever, totaling more than $4 billion, compared to $3.8 billion in 2014 and under $3.7 billion in 2012.

And, all things considered, Democrats and Republicans roughly split the costs of the election, with each picking up 47.7 percent of the tab;the remaining 4.6 percent came from independent groups or spending that lacks party codes in our data (like most of PAC overhead, for instance).

President Donald Trump‘s campaign cost almost $398 million, which was considerably lower than candidate Hillary Clinton‘s total of more than $768 million. But Trump was Trump, and thus a constant focus of media attention. According to mediaQuant, Inc., from July 2015 through October 2016 Trump received free media worth more than $5.9 billion. Clinton received less than half that figure, a little under $2.8 billion.

That helped negate the fact that Clinton and her supporters massively outspent Trump and his. Clinton outpaced Trump in campaign committee spending as well as party support; and her outside spending firepower was especially impressive, as single-candidate groups backing Clinton spent more than triple the amount that those in favor of Trump spent.

*Outside spending, in this case, consists of outside groups dedicated to a specific candidate; organizations like the NRA, for example, would not be included.

In 2012, through the channels featured in the above chart, the campaigns of President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney cost more than $2.1 billion combined. Trump and Clinton’s campaigns, on the other hand, didn’t break $1.9 billion — with Clinton’s making up almost 62 percent of the total.

“This was the first presidential cycle of the 21st century in which traditional campaign spending declined,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “Yet the value of earned media can’t be ignored. Media outlets provided nonstop coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign, reducing the negative effect of comparatively anemic spending by his campaign and conservative outside groups.”

An elite cadre

There was another notable difference from the financing of other recent elections, though: Fewer donors provided a larger share of the money. Just look at a group we call the 0.01 percent.

The 0.01 percent consists of the cycle’s top donors — where the number of members equals 1 percent of 1 percent of the United States’ estimated adult population (aged 18 or older). In 2012, that group numbered fewer than 24,000 and gave about $1.6 billion in contributions. The total for 2016’s 0.01 percent spiked to more than $2.3 billion — an increase of about 45 percent. That vastly outstripped the growth in the group’s size, which was only 3 percent.

Most of that increase came in the form of soft money, or contributions to outside spending groups, which more than doubled. Given that there are no limits on the size of these donations, and that super PACs, 501(c)(4)s and similar organizations continue to proliferate with each cycle, soft money gifts are a reliable means of getting enormous sums of cash into elections.

On the flip side, the share of total contributions considered “small,” or made by individuals giving $200 or less in a cycle, fell by about 3.4 percent from 2012 to 2016 — despite the enormous haul of small donations harvested by the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) (and, to a lesser extent, Trump). More than 59 percent of the funds Sanders raised came from donors giving $200 or less. His rhetoric about more economic power funneling toward fewer people as income inequality worsens resonated with the public — and, as it turned out, was appropriate for the cycle’s campaign finance picture as well, where power has become increasingly concentrated within a shrinking group.

In fact, more broadly, total contributions from donors not in the 0.01 percent decreased between presidential cycles.

And here’s the kicker: While the 0.01 percent swings lots of money around, a disproportionate amount of that cash comes from yet another subgroup, and the imbalance has gotten worse with time. In 2012, the top 50 donors made up about 19 percent of the 0.01 percent’s contributions. In 2016, they accounted for nearly 30 percent.

That’s why we also looked at the top 1 percent of 1 percent of donors, a group of fewer than 200 people who spent almost $1 billion combined in the 2016 cycle. The group’s political contributions more than doubled from 2012 to 2016, from about $390 million to nearly $948 million. And although the group’s size grew by about 33.4 percent, which would naturally raise giving totals, the contribution increase amounted to an even greater 143 percent.

The uppermost crust

Billionaire donors like casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, consistently pile millions of dollars onto federal elections. The pair contributed a combined $82.5 million over the course of the 2016 cycle. But they were eclipsed by a single individual: Tom Steyer, a hedge fund manager and environmentalist, who led all donors by pumping more than $90 million into the election. Despite their political differences, Steyer, a liberal, and the Adelsons, staunch conservatives, are on the same page when it comes to spending millions of dollars on their causes.

“On a lot of issues, it’s really a shoot-out between these billionaires who are picking favorites,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a board chair of the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Painter said that wealthy donors often push their agendas to the detriment of society at large. “It’s always hard for a broadly dispersed group to counter a very narrow interest,” he said. “So the money tends to pursue very narrow agendas that are very selfish, and very destructive to the rest of society from the very top to the very bottom. It becomes chaotic; you have irrational policy positions.” Million-dollar donors tend to vie for their own interests, whether those involve causes like gun rights or something more directly related to their business concerns, like the legal status of online gambling.

Among the newcomers to the uppermost crust was Dustin Moskovitz, who emerged with a bang. Prior to the 2016 cycle, the co-founder of Facebook and Asana had contributed to just one federal candidate or cause: He gave $5,200 in 2013 to House candidate Sean Eldridge (D-N.Y.), who is married to Chris Hughes, another Facebook co-founder. Then, in the 2016 cycle, Moskovitz gave almost $18 million to candidates and organizations.

Stories like Moskovitz’ point to the fact that not only are the most prolific donors giving more but also more donors are becoming prolific. 2012 had 37 donors give at least $2 million; 2016 had 110.

“When you see that the bulk of the money is coming from a few wealthy donors — who, by the way, tend to be male, white and older — it’s worrying,” said Every Voice’s Laura Friedenbach. “It gives the impression that the government is not working for the rest of us,” she said.

Surprise, surprise

In our pre-election estimate of the 2016 cycle’s total cost, we predicted that the election would cost at least $6.9 billion. With a final cost of roughly $6.5 billion, we were off by about 6.4 percent.

The most impactful contributor to the gap between our prediction and the final tally was outside spending. In 2012, outside spending constituted 19 percent of the election’s cost; in 2016, that number shot up to 24 percent. (And remember that the greatest change in the 0.01 percent’s giving from 2012 to 2016 was the group’s soft money contributions, which fuel outside spending groups.) Our projection took that larger share of the pool into account and also operated under the assumption that outside spending would increase as election day neared, as it often does. But outside spending actually slowed down relative to 2012, causing our estimate to be a little high.

Regardless, about 42 percent of outside spending went to Democrats and roughly 56 percent to Republicans.

Another surprise was the spending of party committees. We estimated that groups like the DNC and RNC would spend $1.3 billion, and they ended up pouring more than $1.5 billion into the election. Still, that was within 3 percent of 2012’s slightly-larger figure.

For a full breakdown of the cost of the 2016 election, see the chart below. You can sort it by any of the columns to pinpoint whatever metric you’re interested in.

Correction, 4/17: The original version of this story said that the share of contributions made by individuals giving $200 or less fell by 4 percent from 2012 to 2016. The correct figure is 3.4 percent. We have modified the text accordingly and regret the error.